It got seriously under way

It got seriously under way, this sensitizing, either with the letter from Mucho or the evening she and Metzger drifted into a strange bar known as The Scope. Looking back she forgot which had come first. The letter itself had nothing much to say, had come in response to one of her dutiful, more or less rambling, twice-a-week notes to him,link, in which she was not confess-ing to her scene with Metzger because Mucho, she felt, somehow, would know. Would then proceed at a KCUF record hop to look out again across the gleaming gym floor and there in one of the giant keyholes inscribed for basketball see, groping her vertical back-stroke a little awkward opposite any boy heels might make her an inch taller than, a Sharon, Linda or Michele, seventeen and what is known as a hip one, whose velveted eyes ultimately, statistically would meet Mucho's and respond, and the thing would develop then groovy as it could when you found you couldn't get statutory rape really out of the back of your law-abiding head. She knew the pattern because it had happened a few times already, though Oedipa had been most scrupulously fair about it, mentioning the practice only once, in fact,fake montblanc pens, another three in the morn-ing and out of a dark dawn sky, asking if he wasn't worried about the penal code. "Of course,fake uggs," said Mucho after awhile, that was all; but in his tone of voice she thought she heard more, something between annoy-ance and agony. She wondered then if worrying af-fected his performance. Having once been seventeen and ready to laugh at almost anything, she found herself then overcome by, call it a tenderness she'd never go quite to the back of lest she get bogged. It kept her from asking him any more questions. Like all their inabilities to communicate, this too had a virtuous motive.
It may have been an intuition that the letter would be newsless inside that made Oedipa look more closely at its outside, when it arrived. At first she didn't see. It was an ordinary Muchoesque envelope, swiped from the station,Discount UGG Boots, ordinary airmail stamp, to the left of the cancellation a blurb put on by the government, report all obscene mail To your potsmaster. Idly, she began to skim back through Mucho's letter after reading it to see if there were any dirty words. "Metzger," it occurred to her, "what is a pots-master?"
"Guy in the scullery," replied Metzger authori-tatively from the bathroom, "in charge of all the heavy stuff, canner kettles, gunboats, Dutch ovens . . ."
She threw a brassiere in at him and said, "I'm supposed to report all obscene mail to my pots-master."
"So they make misprints," Metzger said, "let them. As long as they're careful about not pressing the wrong button, you know?"
It may have been that same evening that they happened across The Scope, a bar out on the way to L.A., near the Yoyodyne plant. Every now and again, like this evening, Echo Courts became impossible, either because of the stillness of the pool and the blank windows that faced on it, or a prevalence of teenage voyeurs, who'd all had copies of Miles's pass-key made so they could check in at whim on any bi-zarre sexual action. This would grow so bad Oedipa and Metzger got in the habit of dragging a mattress into the walk-in closet, where Metzger would then move the chest of drawers up against the door, remove the bottom drawer and put it on top, insert his legs in the empty space, this being the only way he could lie full length in this closet, by which point he'd usually lost interest in the whole thing.